Blog Archives
Your Good Death: Why End-of-Life Healthcare Is So Difficult and How to Make It Work for You
Karen Lutfey Spencer’s Your Good Death is a research-based examination of how Americans experience serious illness, caregiving, palliative care, hospice, and death. Drawing on more than a decade of sociological research, interviews with patients and professionals, and her own family’s experiences, Spencer shows how medical decisions are shaped by far more than personal preference. Insurance rules, fragmented communication, institutional routines, financial incentives, and the availability of caregivers all influence what choices patients can realistically make. The book’s central contribution is its clear explanation of how these systems operate, often invisibly, around people who are already managing fear, pain, exhaustion, and uncertainty.
Spencer organizes the book around vivid personal accounts that make complex policy questions immediate and comprehensible. One of the earliest patients, Lilly, captures the emotional contradiction at the center of end-of-life planning when she says, “Where do I want to die? I don’t.” Such moments allow the book to acknowledge mortality without turning it into an abstraction. Spencer’s restrained, attentive narration respects the people whose stories she tells, while her sociological analysis identifies patterns across their experiences. The result is an effective balance of narrative and scholarship. Readers encounter the consequences of delayed referrals, uncertain prognoses, treatment momentum, caregiving burdens, and poor coordination through individual lives.
The book is especially persuasive in its critique of the language of patient choice. Spencer argues that giving patients nominal authority doesn’t guarantee that they receive timely information, practical support, or a meaningful range of options. As she writes, “‘choices’ are not simply a function of unfettered patient preference but are also shaped by medical, economic, and social systems.” Her discussions of palliative care and hospice are particularly useful because they explain the services in relation to patients’ actual needs. Later chapters translate this analysis into concrete guidance about requesting referrals, assessing quality of life, recognizing changes that clinicians may not see, planning for caregiving, and communicating preferences before a crisis narrows the available paths.
Your Good Death is a fantastic institutional analysis and practical guide. Its recommendations emerge naturally from the evidence, so the book rarely feels prescriptive or simplistic. Spencer recognizes that a good death has no universal form, and she asks readers to define their own priorities while understanding the conditions that may support or obstruct them. The autobiographical passages add moral weight to the research, particularly in the epilogue, where earlier lessons about palliative care, hospice, autonomy, and family presence converge in one final caregiving experience. Thoughtful, compassionate, and analytically rigorous, the book equips readers to approach end-of-life healthcare with greater knowledge, confidence, and attention to the systems surrounding every personal decision.
Pages: 288 | ASIN : B0GV4FSYQT
Full Circles
Kenneth D. Thompson Sr.’s Full Circles: The Circles of Life Navigated to Become the Father I Wish I Had is a memoir about fatherhood, race, community, and the decision to turn an old wound into a useful life. Thompson traces his path from a crowded home in East Austin to corporate leadership, elected office, national advocacy, and eventually the White House. Yet the book’s real center is more intimate: a boy repeatedly searching the crowd for an absent father, then growing into a man determined that his own son would never have to conduct the same search. Thompson tells that story with candor, humor, anger, and a strong sense of place.
The early chapters bring East Austin to life through neighborhood stores, schoolyards, churches, ball fields, music, food, nicknames, and the adults who kept an eye on everybody’s children. Thompson doesn’t romanticize poverty, but he makes the community’s creativity and closeness easy to feel. His memories of segregation and poorly handled school integration add important historical weight. The closing of Black schools, the removal of educational opportunities, and the racism he encountered weren’t abstract policies. They shaped his friendships, ambitions, and understanding of power. Sports also become a language for nearly everything in the book, including discipline, belonging, exclusion, mentorship, and pride.
Thompson’s voice is one of the memoir’s greatest strengths. He writes like someone telling stories across a kitchen table, moving naturally between painful recollection, sharp observation, and a well-timed joke. He’s willing to describe his own arrogance, mistakes, marital struggles, and professional missteps, which keeps the book from becoming a polished résumé of accomplishments. At times, the number of names and community memories can slow the narrative, but they also show that Thompson sees his life as collective rather than solitary. Coaches, teachers, relatives, neighbors, coworkers, and friends all helped supply pieces of the guidance his father didn’t provide.
The second half follows Thompson as he builds a family, advances at IBM, returns to community work, becomes the first Black trustee elected to the Pflugerville school board, and advocates for fathers in child welfare and public policy. These achievements matter because the book connects each of them to the same personal question: what does it mean to show up? Thompson’s answer is practical rather than sentimental. Presence means attending games, challenging institutions, opening doors, admitting mistakes, and making sure children know they’re loved. As he puts it, “You can find purpose exactly where you are, in the space you occupy.”
By the end, the title’s full-circle image feels earned. The arenas, schools, neighborhoods, and political spaces that once reminded Thompson of exclusion become places where he creates access for his son and others. The family motto “Never Surrender” captures both the book’s persistence and its moral balance, especially in its warning never to believe that you’re above or beneath another person. Full Circles is a deeply personal account of how one man assembled a model of fatherhood from community examples, hard lessons, and deliberate choices. Its lasting impression comes from Thompson’s belief that legacy isn’t simply what a person achieves. It’s the care, guidance, and presence that others can carry forward.
Pages: 165 | ASIN : B0H6CY7G9Q
Intervention in Church Conflict
Dorothy R. Dann’s Intervention in Church Conflict is a practical theological case study of congregational healing. Adapted from her Doctor of Ministry project, the book recounts Dann’s appointment to a divided church and her development of an intervention model combining family systems theory, narrative therapy, pastoral care, and biblical reflection. Its central premise is that a congregation should be understood as a living network of relationships rather than a collection of isolated individuals. Accordingly, conflict becomes a systemic condition shaped by history, anxiety, leadership patterns, and the stories members tell about their common life. Dann’s stated goal is to help congregations develop internal resources that can stabilize their relationships and support a healthier future.
The book’s strongest contribution is its integration of theory with a detailed account of ministry practice. Dann draws from writers such as Peter Steinke, Edwin Friedman, Ronald Richardson, Michael Nichols, Richard Schwartz, Paul Stevens, and Phil Collins, but she consistently translates their ideas into congregational terms. Concepts such as self-differentiation, emotional systems, shared leadership, and preferred narratives become concrete through listening sessions, leadership development, Bible study, planning exercises, and a weekend retreat. Her emphasis on “wholeness, not oneness” captures the model’s respect for difference within a connected community. Rather than seeking forced agreement, the intervention helps members recognize their distinct gifts, accept shared responsibility, and recover a common sense of mission.
Dann’s narrative of the leadership retreat gives the book much of its practical value. Participants examined the congregation’s history, assessed existing ministries, identified strengths, and began constructing a more hopeful account of their future. The process encouraged leaders to separate the church’s identity from its conflict-saturated story. One participant observed, “We realized that we were far better off than we had originally thought,” a statement that illustrates the intervention’s central movement from discouragement toward recognition of existing capacity. The reported results include better-attended meetings, clearer priorities, renewed lay leadership, expanded youth and adult ministries, greater openness in discussion, and increased confidence in the congregation’s mission. These outcomes make the book useful as both a ministry narrative and an adaptable resource for organizational leaders.
The book’s academic origins remain visible in its repeated explanations, extensive summaries of supporting authors, and careful documentation of the project’s stages. This structure gives readers a transparent view of how the intervention was conceived, implemented, and evaluated. The final model gathers the book’s insights into a sequence of practices: create safety, remain present and nonreactive, listen for systemic patterns, make room for a preferred story, support transformation, record appropriate plans, and equip laypeople for mission. Dann’s most persuasive insight is that constructive change begins when leaders shift attention from blame to responsibility, motivation, and available strengths. Intervention in Church Conflict is therefore a thoughtful professional resource for pastors, counselors, mediators, and church leaders who want to understand conflict as a relational reality and guide communities toward renewed purpose.
Pages: 97 | ASIN : B0CW1L7FG2
Secrets and Trauma
The Words She Left Behind tells your story as you become the caretaker for your estranged aunt and uncover, through journals, letters, and the devastation of Alzheimer’s, a more complicated woman than anyone understood. Why was this an important book for you to write?
This book was written with the intention of creating a timeline of events leading up to my aunt’s diagnosis. After unexpectedly finding my aunt’s journals, I realized there were profound secrets between the pages. I felt an intense urge to get to the core of her anger and hatred towards my family. Through the process of reading, interviewing, and research, I was able to find secrets and trauma, which then led me to build empathy and forgiveness. With an understanding of what had happened in my aunt’s life, I was able to share the details of my discoveries with my mother, her sister. We eventually all found healing due to the words she left behind in her journals.
When you found Toni’s journals, letters, and stored belongings, did your understanding of her change all at once or slowly over time?
The healing happened over time. At the same time I was reading her journals, I was also forming a relationship with my aunt–a relationship I never had with her. Through both experiences, I found compassion and empathy for her. This journey of forgiveness took over a year because there was so much hatred built up for almost twenty years.
How did caring for Toni reshape your relationship with your mother, Mary, and your understanding of their history as sisters?
My mother and I have always been close. Mary also never gave up hope that one day she and her sister could rebuild their relationship. At first, it was very difficult for my mother, but she eventually got to a place where love was able to grow between her and Toni again. It’s now a beautiful relationship. This was my goal all along–a gift to my mother.
Author Links: Linktree
Ex-Mas Song
Ex-Mas Song follows Justin R., a man who survives a suicide attempt during a snowstorm and wakes into a Christmas-haunted reckoning with his failures, his toxic attachment to Blair, his fractured family life, and his need for recovery. The novel moves through a psychiatric ward, painful memory, spiritual confrontation, and Dickensian visitations until Christmas becomes less a holiday than an autopsy of the heart, and, finally, a chance to choose life.
I found the book emotionally raw in a way that feels deliberately unpolished at the edges. Justin’s voice is funny, bitter, wounded, and frequently self-lacerating; he jokes because the alternative is to collapse. The Christmas references pile up almost like snowdrifts, songs, sweets, movies, scripture, old family rituals, and that abundance gives the novel its strange pulse. It can be messy, but the mess has intention. The story understands that despair is rarely neat, and recovery often begins in the least ceremonial places: an ER curtain, a locked ward, a stale room, a remembered plate of fudge.
I liked the way the book refuses to make healing sentimental. Blair isn’t simply a villain, Justin isn’t simply a victim, and the psychiatric ward is not merely a setting for misery. Everyone is carrying some private corrosion. The Christian framework is explicit and central, but the strongest moments are not sermons; they are moments of recognition, when Justin sees how much of his life has been governed by appetite, fear, resentment, and bad bargains. The prose can swing from comic riff to apocalyptic vision in a single breath, and while that tonal volatility may not suit every reader, it gives the book a feverish, singular energy.
This book is best for readers of Christian fiction, inspirational fiction, and contemporary spiritual drama, especially those who appreciate stories about suicide recovery, addiction, toxic relationships, forgiveness, and faith-based transformation. Readers who love A Christmas Carol will recognize the structure immediately, though this feels closer in grit and confession to a recovery-room answer to Dickens than a cozy retelling. Ex-Mas Song is a bruised Christmas carol for anyone who has mistaken survival for defeat.
Pages: 486 | ASIN : B0CNJKZJ3F
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia
Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia is a book-length work of poetic nonfiction about a son watching his mother disappear into dementia while trying to understand the family, faith, grief, and love that shaped them both. Theodore McDowell writes in short, poem-like pieces that feel intimate and immediate, almost like entries in a spiritual journal. The book begins with his mother as a figure of wonder, especially in the opening memory of a cathedral, candlelight, and childhood awe. When he writes, “Mom was more beautiful than stained glass,” he gives the reader the emotional key to the whole book.
The first half follows the author’s mother through memory care, illness, and death, but it also keeps returning to who she was before dementia took hold. She’s a nurse, a gardener, a dancer, a mother, a woman shaped by poverty, marriage, faith, fear, and resilience. McDowell doesn’t flatten her into sainthood. He lets her be complicated, loving, wounded, and sometimes unable to protect the people she loves. That honesty gives the book its weight.
One of the strongest things about the writing is the way ordinary caregiving moments become sacred without losing their physical reality. Washing a face, feeding puree, changing clothes, sitting in silence, and watching someone search for a name all become acts of witness. The religious imagery is everywhere, but it’s grounded in bodies, rooms, porches, wheelchairs, storms, and nursing home hallways. The line “I am their memory keeper” captures the role McDowell takes on throughout the book, carrying what his parents can no longer hold.
The second half opens the book outward, moving from the author’s mother to a wider collage of people living with dementia and those caring for them. These pieces give the book a larger human reach, showing spouses, children, caretakers, and patients caught in different versions of the same unraveling. Music, gardens, birds, oceans, and old dance halls keep returning as places where memory flickers back to life. Even when the scenes are painful, the writing keeps looking for dignity in the person who remains.
This is a deeply personal book, but it’s also a meditation on what love asks of us when memory breaks down. McDowell’s style is lyrical, prayerful, and often raw, with images that linger after the page turns. The book is at its best when it lets grief sit beside tenderness, anger beside forgiveness, and faith beside doubt. Stained Glass Tainted by Dementia reads like a long act of remembrance, one that honors a mother, mourns a disease, and gives language to the slow work of saying goodbye.
Pages: 239 | ASIN : B0GFB3Z3L6
Innate Character
The Man Who Obviated Christmas follows a lonely, aging catalog manager whose comic Christmas Eve misadventure with two stranded kittens leads him toward an unexpected late-life reckoning. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Last autumn, I decided to send a Christmas story instead of a greeting card to a few of my old friends. The idea was for an anti-Santa Claus figure. The cat rescue was the result. Edward had the proportions of Santa, was dressed in black, climbed a ladder instead of sliding down a chimney, was gruff to children, and yet brought them joy and gave away all his money for presents. After Christmas, I found that I was still intrigued with Edward and Kleo. They were live characters. For me, once I get a couple of live characters, the book has basically been written, I sit back and watch and record. So Christmas became the backdrop, the mood, the tint.
Edward Brash is often vain, fussy, and ridiculous, yet deeply sympathetic. How did you balance his comic flaws with his emotional vulnerability?
Social isolation can induce all of those flaws. But loss doesn’t necessarily affect a person’s innate character. Inwardly, Edward was still the raw kid who wound up for one magical year with a beautiful, sophisticated wife. In self-induced mourning for three decades, he has grown a skin, but in his mind, he could toss all the years away and would again magically become slim if Autumn walked through the door.
Why did Christmas feel like the right setting for Edward’s story, especially given the novel’s resistance to easy sentimentality?
See above. Also, this is a story set intentionally in black and white. What could be more black and white than a cold Christmas Eve or a rainy New Year’s Eve?
Kleo is not presented as a simple cure for Edward’s loneliness. How did you approach writing their relationship with restraint and emotional honesty?
I wish I had a woman’s point of view, because I would have made Kleo the principle character instead of Edward.) It’s beyond my experience that mature people can fall in love and simply shed their characters. By New Year’s Eve, Edward and Kleo still don’t know much about each other’s private lives. Is Kleo delusional? Is Edward hiding something? But they’ve spent their lives working together, eyeing and unconsciously evaluating each other every business day. They trust each other. Maybe that’s enough to make the survival existences they have each fashioned tolerable, at least for a start.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Edward Brash has spent decades building a life defined by control, routine, and emotional distance. Once shaped by youthful love and possibility, he now exists behind an impenetrable persona, moving through his days as a capable but detached executive. The rhythms of work and solitude have replaced connection, and the world beyond his routines feels increasingly distant.
On a bleak Christmas Eve, a chance encounter disrupts that carefully ordered existence. Drawn into an unexpected and chaotic effort to rescue two children’s stranded cats, Edward finds himself acting on instinct rather than detachment. The moment is small and almost absurd, yet it unsettles something long dormant within him.
The following morning, in a cemetery where he has created a private ritual of remembrance, Edward encounters a colleague he has long misunderstood. Their conversation unfolds into an unlikely connection, revealing hidden histories, shared isolation, and the quiet persistence of longing beneath carefully maintained lives.
Over the course of a single holiday, Edward is forced to confront the distance between who he has become and who he once was. Yet this is not a story of easy redemption or clear resolution. Instead, it offers an unflinching exploration of those who find themselves outside the structures of belonging, questioning whether reconnection is ever truly possible.
For readers drawn to thoughtful, character-driven fiction, The Man Who Obviated Christmas is a reflective and deeply human novel about solitude, memory, and the uncertain path back to meaning.
The 12 Bad Dates Before Christmas
The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas, by N.L. DiDeo, follows Evie Holliday, a hardworking architect whose quiet single life is upended when her mother issues a holiday ultimatum: go on twelve dates before Christmas or surrender her romantic future to the “Church Cupids.” What begins as a parade of dating-app calamities becomes something warmer and more surprising when Evie repeatedly crosses paths with Ryan, a charming police officer and single father whose presence feels less like a rescue and more like a well-timed miracle. Set against the festive sparkle of St. Augustine, this clean holiday romance turns bad dates, meddling family, and emotional-support donuts into the scaffolding for a sweet love story.
I had fun with this book because it understands the comic misery of dating without becoming sour about love. Evie’s voice is chatty, self-protective, and genuinely funny, especially when she is cataloging each romantic disaster like evidence at a crime scene. The book’s humor works best when it lets ordinary humiliations swell into operatic little catastrophes: garlic rolls withheld like sacred relics, a karaoke ambush, a mother treating a dating profile like a surveillance operation. There is a buoyant absurdity to the premise, but the story stays grounded through Evie’s affection for her family, her friendship with Lanie, and her growing recognition that being busy is not the same as being fulfilled.
Ryan gives the romance its steadier pulse. I appreciated that he is not written as a flawless fantasy dropped into Evie’s life to solve everything; he comes with responsibilities, a daughter he adores, and enough patience to meet Evie’s chaos with warmth rather than swagger. The relationship develops with a light touch, and the closed-door approach keeps the focus on banter, trust, family integration, and the small rituals that make two lives begin to rhyme. Some of the setups are broad, and the bad dates lean deliberately cartoonish, but that theatrical quality feels baked into the charm. The book is not trying to be austere. It is a frosted sugar cookie with a surprisingly sturdy center.
The target audience is readers who enjoy clean romance, holiday romance, small-town romance, romantic comedy, and Christmas fiction. Fans of Debbie Macomber’s cozy seasonal stories or Jenny Hale’s Christmas romances will likely feel at home here, though N.L. DiDeo brings a more antic, sitcom-bright dating-app energy to the familiar holiday-love framework. This is a cheerful, low-angst read for anyone who wants family meddling, festive settings, sweet chemistry, and a love story that believes embarrassment can be a doorway. The 12 (Bad) Dates Before Christmas is a merry reminder that the road to forever may begin with one truly terrible first date.
Pages: 295 | ASIN : B0GX2YLJJQ
